Revelation 22:6

And he said unto me, These words are faithful and true: and the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, sent his angel to show unto his servants the things which must shortly come to pass.

These words are faithful and true .... Apparently, an angel is the speaker here, but Christ is behind all that he said. "This whole book is represented by John as the Revelation of Jesus Christ, through the angel."[25] The divine authority of the entire Revelation is affirmed. "The primary purpose of this epilogue (Revelation 22:6-21) is to affirm the authority of John's book.[26] The meaning of this whole verse is: "The words of the Christian prophets do not speak their own minds, but God's."[27] Lenski's outline of this epilogue is:

God's attestation (Revelation 22:6-15).

Jesus' attestation (Revelation 22:16-19).

John is dismissed (Revelation 22:20).

John's farewell greeting (Revelation 22:21).[28]

We acutely need this divine attestation, for the most glaring error in most of the books one reads on this prophecy is that of making the "source" of these visions to be everything or anything except what it is; namely, a revelation from God (Revelation 1:1). As far as this writer is concerned, if people do not believe that God authored this book, they could spare themselves the trouble of studying it, much more the labor of writing their comments on it.

"The angel" here does not say that God commissioned "me," his angel, but that, "God commissioned his angel." "Angel is used here generically to designate whatever angel acted at any time in the vision."[29] Thus the angel here speaks for God himself.

The God of the spirits of the prophets ... The "prophets" here are those of both the Old and the New Testaments; God spoke through all of them. This is the message of God's deputy angel in this passage.

To show the things that must shortly come to pass ... As Wesley put it, "which will begin to be performed immediately."[30] "The adverb shortly modifies the verb come to pass, telling how it is to occur, suddenly."[31] The false idea that John expected all of the things in this prophecy to appear within a few years should be rejected. The present dispensation was described as "a thousand years" in Revelation 20; and that proves that our prophecy takes a long view of the ages; and yet many of the things in it were in the process of happening at the very time it was written.

[25] G. R. Beasley-Murray, op. cit., p. 334.

[26] George Eldon Ladd, op. cit., p. 289.

[27] J. R. Dummelow, Commentary on the Holy Bible (New York: Macmillan Company, 1937), p. 1092.

[28] R. C. H. Lenski, op. cit., p. 655.

[29] Ibid., p. 657.

[30] John Wesley, op. cit., in loco.

[31] James D. Strauss, The Seer, the Saviour, and the Saved (Joplin, Missouri: College Press, 1972), p. 288.